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CES 2012 Coverage

Other World Computing

Other World Computing (OWC) had made its name as one of the leading retailers of accessories for a variety of Apple products, including the iPod, iPhone, and MacBook line. OWC has also been making a name for itself in the SSD market, featuring drives compatible with all major operating systems. OWC took the opportunity at CES to show off a number of its drives, including the Mercury and Aura Pro drives.

The new Mercury Enterprise Pro 6G SSD is targeted towards mission critical servers, small businesses, and production studio use. The drive is powered by the SandForce 2500 controller, providing data rates in excess of 500MB/s. The drives are available in capacities of 50GB, 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB, with a price range of $629 to $2,199. Two of the features that were particularly interesting were the Paratus Power Technology and automatic encryption of data using the AES-256/128 hardware double-encrypted format. The Paratus technology ensures that data integrity can still be maintained in the event of unexpected power interruptions.

OWC also announced an addition to its Mercury Aura Pro Express line of SSD, providing the only non-factory hard drive upgrade option for the MacBook Air laptop. The now available 480GB model joins the 120GB and 240GB model to provide large amounts of storage at incredibly fast speeds. The new Aura Pro drive will feature a retail price of $1,149 and is now available for pre-order from OWC.

OWC also displayed several of its current offerings at CES, including the Mercury Electra and Mercury EXTREME Pro. All of the SSD models can be seen in the photo below.

OWC also announced its entry in the enterprise SAN storage market, with the Jupiter mini-SAS scalable storage solution. The Jupiter is comparable to current SAN solutions, boasting speeds of up to 24Gb/s, up to three times faster than current fibre channel implementations. In addition to the increased speed, it also costs up to five times less than a comparable fibre channel solution. A variety of RAID options are supported, allowing for a wide array of potential uses for the system. OWC provides both four and eight bay towers, with eight and 16 bay racks, allowing for up to 3.6PB of total storage.

Also on display at the OWC booth was the Power2U wall outlet from Newer Technology Inc. The patented, UL listed wall outlet features two traditional plugs as well as two USB ports to provide for ease-of-use when charging many of your favorite portable devices. The outlet features Smart Power design, providing only enough power to to charge the attached device. The spring loaded shutters turn off power to the USB outlets as soon as they are closed.

Although it wasn't on display, one of the OWC representatives told us that the company is currently working on a PCI Express based SSD. This drive should provide extremely fast read and write speeds as it won't be limited by the SATA interface.